"A genuine crack for Windows Vista has just been released by pirate group Pantheon, which allows a pirated, non-activated installation of Vista (Home Basic/Premium and Ultimate) to be properly activated and made fully-operational. Unlike cracks which have been floating around since Vista RTM was released in late November, this crack doesn't simply get around product activation with beta activation files or timestop cracks - it actually makes use of the activation process."

Not getting anything in a knot, however the whole "choice" thing is merely a byproduct of the nature of Linux, i.e. that it's open source. The other byproduct is fragmentation, along with the more popular platforms being more supported than the obscure ones by application developers, driver writers, etc. Which is why...

In reality, Linux only runs well on maybe 3-4 platforms, i.e. fooling around with it for 2 hours tops before you can walk away from the machine without having to worry about stability, and the ability to buy any kind of mainstream hardware without sweating if it will plug and play into your Linux box.

Don't get me wrong, choice is great...however the chant of "a dozen or so different platforms" simply isn't true, and in almost all cases, generic x86/x64 hardware is plenty good enough these days without developers having to stretch themselves paper thin supporting edge case hardware.